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This is Glendale Presbyterian Church People Moving Power. This tape includes the reading of scripture and a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman titled "The Righteousness Rat Race." At the conclusion of side number one of this cassette, be sure to turn immediately to side number two for the remainder of the

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message. This tape is copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Any public or commercial use, in full or in part, requires the advanced written permission of Dr. Thielman. The private use of this material for the spiritual gain of yourself or others is heartily encouraged. If you would like a catalog

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listing additional tapes available, write to People Moving Power at the address on this cassette. The reading of God's Word as it is recorded first in the prophecy of Isaiah, reading from the sixth chapter, and then from the letter to the Romans, reading

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from the eighth chapter, beginning at Isaiah 6 with the verse numbered 1. "In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim, each had six wings. With two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet,

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and with two he flew. And one called to another and said, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts! The whole earth is full of his glory.' And the foundations of the threshold shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said, 'Woe is me, for I am lost! For I am a man of unclean lips, and

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I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.' Then flew one of the seraphim to me, having in his hand a burning coal which he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said, 'Behold, this has touched your lips. Your guilt is taken away, and

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your sin forgiven.' And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?' Then I said, 'Here am I, send me.'" And continuing our reading from the twelfth chapter of Romans, beginning at verse 1, "I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to

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present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect." And may God bless to us and to

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our understanding these readings from his holy words. Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Recently a member of the Glendale Presbyterian Church, whose identity I do not know, expressed a viewpoint which was subsequently shared with me, and which

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calls to mind again a problem I faced many times in my ministry. This person suggested that I am out of this pulpit more than I should be, that I travel too much on preaching missions and the like, and that I am doing this principally, or at least to some significant degree, in order to build a national reputation

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for myself. Now the problem this comment presses on me again is simply this. I don't know whether this charge is accurate or inaccurate. There can be no denying the fact that I am absent from this pulpit more frequently than most clergy are absent from theirs. There can be no denying the fact that my absences

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have contributed a great deal towards whatever national reputation I might have. The question arises therefore at the point where I pause to examine my motive for travel. Do I in fact travel and preach elsewhere as I do to serve God or to serve groups? And I shall be perfectly frank with you and say that I

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don't really know. The best and most honest answer I can give is that my motives are missing. As I've already said, this is an old problem for me. I can still recall the struggle I went through after I preached for the very first time. I got a tremendous thrill out of it and was on the proverbial cloud nine for

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days. But then I began to carefully examine my euphoria and to question whether it was related to the personal joy I got out of preaching or to the joy I got out of proclaiming the Word of God for God's and others' sake, not my own. And the consideration of this problem has never left me in 15 years of ministry.

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Now those of you who have no need of the acceptance of others, you rugged individualists, will probably not understand very much of what I am saying this morning. But those of you who find yourselves needing encouragement, a kind word, a slap on the back, the well done of other people, those of you who are

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like me will know exactly what I'm talking about. When you do acts of service in the name of Jesus, are you doing them for yourself, that is to gain the acceptance that you so much need, or are you doing them out of a sincere and righteous desire to serve God? That's my problem. I think the problem belongs to

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some of you too. The best I can say of myself, and indeed the only honest thing I can say of myself, is my motives are mixed. I'm recently back from Concord, California and a preaching mission there. Dozens recommitted themselves and between 30 and 40 made their first time personal commitment to Jesus Christ and

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this thrills my soul. But I also came away from Concord riding a tremendous wave of affirmation and appreciation, and this thrills my soul too. So which thrill means the most to me? I honestly do not know. Some of you have commented from time to time that I do not stand at the door following most of our hours of

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worship. This is not principally because I'm too exhausted or because I'm called elsewhere, and it's most certainly not because I do not want to meet and greet you. It's because of the kind things you say. Your compliments are much enjoyed by yours truly. They fill a real need in my life. I need to be loved and

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supported by you. So I start to soak them up and then I feel guilty about this. After all, the glory is to be God's and not mine, and so I decide that I will absent myself from the place of temptation, shaking hands and listening to your kind words, and thus avoid thinking of Bruce when I ought to be

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thinking of the one Bruce is called to serve. It is extremely difficult for me to bear your kindnesses, for I am forever questioning my motives when I listen to or receive them. I am forever led to give up preaching and teaching here at the Glendale Presbyterian Church, to give up preaching and teaching elsewhere, to give

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up meeting and greeting you and hundreds of other people in other cities, until I resolve this issue in myself, until I unmix my motives. Now I call this feeling, this struggle, the righteousness rat race, and it's based on two very simple propositions. First, I know that my motives in the service of Christ aren't

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always pure, and second, I know that this should not be so. For me to live should be Christ. So the question presses home. Should I forsake ministry until I solve this inner contradiction which I suffer, and I think a lot of other people suffer also? Well, as I say, this problem is now about 20 years old in my life, and I've

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had a lot of experience with it, and since I am standing here preaching at this very moment, you can easily see that I have decided that the best thing to do is to keep on ministering in spite of mixed motives, and to keep on traveling in spite of mixed motives, and to keep on meeting and greeting people in spite of

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mixed motives. And there are some very definite reasons why I have made this decision. First, I decided that I just don't have the time to wait until I am righteous enough to have conquered all of the mixed motives in my life. The plain fact is that I am a sinner, and I always will be. It's a very comforting

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thing to me to recall that the Apostle Paul, the man who wrote "For me to live is Christ," also wrote "The good I would I do not, and that which I would not I do, O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death?" Now there are some who prefer to think of Paul as sinless. To mention his

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weaknesses, his mixed motives, seems to them to be in the worst of taste. Well, no one who puts taste above truth is to be taken very seriously. The fact is, Paul was continually conscious of his own sin. In five of his epistles, he begged for the prayers of his readers, lest he himself be attacked away, and even at the

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very end of his life he describes himself as the chief of sinners. Now I believe that Paul was an honest man. I believe when he wrote those words to Timothy that he meant them, that he was telling the truth, and I for one thank God that Paul did not so become involved in the righteousness rat race that he

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gave up his ministry until he unmixed his motives. I thank God that Paul did not say, "I will not travel, and I will not bear witness, and I will not write letters, and I will not speak a good word for Jesus till I get all of my own sins straightened out, then I will begin." Had he done that, waited until he was

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righteous before proclaiming the righteous word of God, we would be so impoverished as Christians that I have no words to adequately describe such a state. Paul, you see, had the courage of his imperfection. That phrase is not mine. It was coined by the noted psychologist Dr. Alfred Adler. Psychiatrists and

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counselors agree that perfectionism accounts for a large number of personality disorders. The perfectionist is the individual who cannot endure the thought of making mistakes, who can't bear the humiliation of being found in error. This is the man who fears to paint a picture lest someone find a fault in

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it. This is the young lad who won't date a girl even though he wants to. His reason? She may reveal some flaw in him that may prove disillusioning. This is the girl who has trouble with her forehand in tennis and rather than be seen in an awkward and graceless moment, gives up the game. This is the man, the woman, or

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the boy, or the girl who wants to serve Christ but who holds back because he or she knows personal weakness and is desperately afraid that this weakness of creed or conduct, of character or expertise, this weakness will embarrass either Jesus or themselves. So caught in the predicament of perfectionist

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neuroses, or at least to some degree caught in it, they start treading the mill of the righteousness rat race. Make no mistake, I am not suggesting that we are not to do our best. We are never to be content with the mediocre. We are to be everything we are capable of being. Jesus said, "Be complete as your Father in

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heaven is complete." But in our pursuit of the ideal, the healthy spiritual mind remembers that we are finite, limited, fallible creatures. We are compassed about with infirmity, to use the New Testament phrase, and imperfections, sins, mixed motives, and the like will inevitably be a part of everything that

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we think or say or do or are. To do nothing till all of these things are gone from us will be to do just that, nothing. The greatest saints accept the reality of their inadequacies, spiritual and otherwise. They do the best they can and do not waste their time in an endless flea hunt for sins. They go on to

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live truly creative and God-honoring lives in spite of their weaknesses. I have come to the conclusion that the individual who draws back from Christ's service until he has all of his life in order is not only guilty of whatever sins keep him back from his proper service, but also of one sin more of

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which he is obviously not aware. He has erected a perfect graven image of himself as he thinks he ought to be, and he is bowing down before that image and seeking to serve that image more ardently, sacrificially, and devotedly than he is bowing down before and seeking to serve Jesus. And this is to fracture the

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second commandment. That commandment is not best understood in its usual translation, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images." That sounds too much like wood carving. The Hebrew read, "El ta'atha leha kol piso," "You shall not make yourself a carved substitute." "You shall not make an image of yourself."

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Persons who hold back from commitment to the service of Jesus Christ on the grounds of their own imperfections are doing exactly that. To all such ones today, let me announce what G.K. Chesterton calls "the glorious good news of original sin." All of us fall short of the glory of God. All of us suffer from

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mixed motives and the rest of it. But the gospel is this, "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and saved for glory the Christian is, and being saved he wants to serve the one who saved him. And knowing both his sin and his Savior, he plunges ahead, just doing what he can and leaving the rest to his Lord." I have

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found much comfort again recently in the story of that woman who interrupted Jesus at dinner, broke a costly vase of ointment, and used it to anoint his feet. Judas, you will recall, said that the ointment should have been sold and the money given to the poor. But Jesus blesses her with these words, "She has

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done what she could." I always go to this passage when my ministry is under attack and the charges are true, or so close to being true that I can't live comfortably with them. Now the recent comments about my preaching missions travel have sent me to this episode again. I don't know why the woman didn't sell the perfume

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and give it to the poor. Maybe psychologically she was unable to consider selling the precious stuff for money. Maybe it was some family treasure and she couldn't bring herself to trading it in for cold cash. Maybe there were practical problems. She didn't know how much it was worth or how to go about

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selling it. Maybe socially she didn't know any poor people. That idea has the possibility of being the truth. How many of us know one truly poor person? And what incidentally does this say about us? Maybe emotionally she was incapable of restraining herself. She might have been one of those expansive types who act on

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impulse rather than careful thought. I don't know why she did not sell the ointment and give the money to the poor. I don't know why she did what she did. I know this, that Jesus said, "She has done what she could and blessed her." And this is what leads me to forsake the righteousness rat race and to do

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something for Christ even if it is with mixed motives. By blessing her, Christ said to me, "When less than perfect people act in a less than perfect way in a less than perfect world, God's love makes up the difference between the deed and the intention." And the healthy Christian does not wait for his perfect righteousness

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before he begins. He begins and admits the imperfections in all of his deeds. He asks for forgiveness not only for his failures but also for his successes since everything falls short of the perfection of God. The Christian seconds the motion made by Robert Browning, "Man's reach must exceed his grasp, else what's

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a heaven for?" But there's a second reason why I continue in my ministry, mixed motives and all, and why a lot of other imperfect Christians do the same. Not only do we not have the time to wait until we are righteous, others, those to whom we are going as witnesses, they don't have the time to wait either. In

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the Old Testament, the word for righteous is "sedaka," and while it has a variety of meanings, one of the foremost of these and indeed one of the basic of these involves the helping of others. There is a very definite personal dimension to righteousness, but there's a social dimension also. Our righteousness

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involves not only us but our relationship to others, and therefore when I start running the righteousness rat race because of my personal inadequacies and sins, when I hold back from service because of my lack of completeness and my imperfections, I am depriving others of the benefits of my

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service and ministry, weak and miserable though they may be. And these others, many of them, just don't have the time to wait for me to get to the place where I think that I am at last perfect enough to take up my cross and begin to follow Jesus. Robert Stover is a good friend of mine who lives in the San Francisco area

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and is the owner and president of Western Girls. He's a fine Christian man whose stewardship and service I very much admire. Once I was part of a group to which he was explaining his passionate zeal to share Christ. He had a business acquaintance named Fred Franklin. Mr. Franklin was married and

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had three children. On many occasions Stover wanted to witness to Franklin, but he hesitated to do so. He was caught, you see, in feelings of personal spiritual weakness. He was afraid that his witness would be rejected or would have a negative effect. One morning he was astonished to pick up the paper and to

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learn that the man had died. He called Franklin's secretary to get the whole story. His health had appeared to be quite robust, what had happened. The girl explained that no one knew exactly what happened. The man went to Seattle, Washington on a business trip and simply stepped out of the window on the 11th

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floor of the Seattle Athletic Club. And Bob Stover confessed that he was still troubled about whether some word that he might have uttered earlier, some act of witness, poor though it might have been, would have saved this man's life and possibly his very soul. My friends, others can't always wait until we get satisfied

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with ourselves. The fact is people came to Christ in that preaching ministry in Northern California a few weeks ago in which I was engaged. Had I not gone, had I decided to sit tight until I determined exactly to what degree my motives were mixed, these people might never have accepted

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Jesus as Lord. And when I think of that, I get out of the righteousness rat race, this ceaseless round of pious exercises, rituals, confessions, lessons, etc., designed to make me into some kind of super Christian, and I get down to the business of ministry. Let me say this gently but nonetheless with clarity and

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positivity. I think it is downright evil to sit around making sure there are no spots on your spiritual robes while other people are going to eternal separation from God. Steve Brown is a young clergy friend of mine who lives and serves in New England. He reminded me of a book titled Dreams and Dream Life

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written by a woman named Olive Schreiner, and in this book she tells of a dream. She says, "I thought I stood before God's throne and God asked me why I'd come. And I said I had come to criticize my brother man because he is not worthy and my hands are pure, and I showed my hands to God and God said, 'How can this be? How

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can your hands be pure?' And I said, 'Dear Lord, the streets of earth are full of mud and dirt. If I should walk right out on those streets, my robes would be spotted too, and you see how white they are. Therefore I carefully pick my way lest I become muddy.' 'Tell me,' said God, 'on what do you step to make sure that you

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yourself stay clean?'" And Mrs. Schreiner concludes her recitation of her dream by saying, "I was silent and then wrapped my robe about my head and went out very quietly because I was afraid the angels would see me." Well, tell me, those of you caught up in the righteousness rat race, when you've attended enough worship

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services morning and evening, when you've memorized enough verses and spent enough time in flocks or small groups confessing your sins to one another, when you've had enough ecstatic experiences and spoken in enough spiritual languages and sung enough spiritual songs, when you finally get to the place, if you ever do,

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where you make bold to say to God, "Look how high I've climbed," will God ask, "On what have you climbed?" And when you look down to see that on which you and your righteousness are built, will you discover there the starved, dying, or dead souls whom you neglected in the passion of your own personal climb? I hope to God

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that will not be so, for that would be a hideous thing to discover and an awful thing to have to bear. We need to discover this truth. Our weaknesses generally don't cripple our witness, they strengthen it. To approach our fellow men outside the family of

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faith with an attitude of superiority and power and extraordinary wisdom will only put them off and diminish the possibility of leading them into relationship with Jesus. But to share our common humanity in an open, vulnerable way is to approach the ideal of servanthood, which should be the goal of

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all Christians in their relationship with the world. We are not called to be high-powered executives of things spiritual, leading the ranks of the bunglers to glory. We are called to be servants who get tangled up in the hopes and the fears and the needs of others, and the key to that kind of tangling is

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to admit our own hopes and our own fears and our own needs, and also that we found a way out and that this way is working and that this way is called Jesus, the love of God. Do you recall that great Old Testament scene in which God confronts Moses and calls him to lead his people up out of Egypt? It's recorded in Exodus

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3 and 4. If you're looking for some good reading for this afternoon, I recommend that you turn to it and read it again. God meets Moses and Moses hears God's call to service and he's astonished that God should want him. "Who am I?" he says. Moses knows who he is. He's a murderer. He's on the lam from Egypt where he

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committed the crime of murder. He's a sense of his own sin and he advances this. "Who me?" He advances it as an argument not to take on the task, and God answers, "I hear my people crying out in Egypt and I've chosen you to serve them." Now I ask you to think about that the next time that you're asked to share

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your faith on an evangelism call or in a Glendale schoolroom and refuse on the basis of some sin which is still yours. Moses tries another excuse. "God, I really haven't had much of an experience of you. I don't really know you." God answers, "I hear my people crying out over there in Egypt and I've chosen you to serve them."

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And I ask you to think about this the next time you're asked to teach a class of love-hungry kids and refuse on the basis that you are not sufficiently spiritually sophisticated. Think about that. Moses tries another excuse. "God, I'm not much of a public speaker. Don't you want someone who can really do an expert

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job for you?" And God answers, and Scripture says he is angry now so I suppose that his voice is louder, "Moses, I hear my people crying out, dying over there in Egypt and I have chosen you to serve them." And I ask you to think about this the next time you withhold a word of witness because you're afraid you'll

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say the wrong thing. "Look, God," Moses finally says, "isn't there somebody else you can line up for the job?" He's pleading now. "Moses, listen, those are your brothers and sisters dying over there. How can you debate my call? How can you argue about my summons? I have chosen you!" And I ask you to think about that, how

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God has chosen you. And Moses, humbled now, gets up and goes and because of his humility, because of his sense of inadequacy, because of his knowledge of his own sin, and because God uses him in spite of those things, he goes on to lead his brothers and sisters to freedom and he leads them in meekness and

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gentleness and he is the grandest and the greatest character in all of the Old Testament. Brothers and sisters, some of our brothers and sisters in creation are going to hell and don't have time to wait for us to finish our own personal righteousness rat race. And I'll suggest one last thing. God doesn't have time to

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wait for us either. In the economy of God, each day is precious, each hour vital, each minute of major importance. To dwaddle away any of the time of God, even figuratively, is not our right or our privilege. There is an urgency in his heart for the whole world and we dare not frustrate it. It's always been

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difficult for me to grasp the concept that we are important in the plan of God, that he in fact depends on us. I vividly recall hearing a sermon many years ago in which the preacher spoke of a terrible train wreck and many people were trapped in the wreckage, some were dead and others dying for lack of

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attention. And a distinguished surgeon who had been aboard the train but was not trapped in the wreckage was walking up and down beside the train weeping and someone asked him why he did not set about helping the injured and he replied, and he replied they say in tears, "I cannot help because I do not have my

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instruments." His surgical instruments. And this preacher then went on to say that we are the instruments of God and that when we make ourselves unavailable for his use, his effectiveness is limited, his plans are frustrated, and I recall thinking as I heard this illustration preached that it surely was inaccurate.

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No man I reasoned could frustrate God. If someone wants to refuse to yield his will to God, God will simply find someone else and that will be the end of it. No one can stop God. But years of considering the sovereignty of God versus the freedom of man have led me to what I trust is a deeper understanding

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of all that is involved here. It is true that God is altogether sovereign and no man can frustrate him, but it's equally true that God is sovereign over his own sovereignty. That is, he is sovereign in the exercise of it or in the withholding of it. Out of his supreme incomprehensible love he has made us in

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our world free. He will not destroy our freedom even if in our freedom we destroy one another and the world as well. He could have fashioned us for the perfectly ordered life of the ant or the bee, but he did not. Instead in love immeasurable he turned much of his sovereignty over to us, even knowing that

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we would fail him. I am not hesitant to say that God actually put himself to this degree into our power. His confidence has never wavered since the doing of that. His love and hope stand steady that we will prove worthy of his gift. He gives all of us everything we need to be saintly, but he will not force

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sainthood upon us. God has elected to lean on our shoulders as he goes about his world. Now that figure of speech, "to lean on the shoulders" from an old book, some of you might have read it when you were children, Little Lord Fauntleroy. There's a scene in that story in which the little Lord is coming down the

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stairs accompanied by his strong and distinguished grandfather, the Duke, and as they come to the landing the little boy looks up at the Duke and says, "Lean on me, grandfather." And the old Duke, who is still quite strong and vigorous and altogether able to get on on his own, looks down, smiles, and accepts the

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assistance. He puts his hand, which has known and still knows vast achievement, firmly on the shoulder of the child and yields to the help. Now that illustration is very clumsy and I would not want to be held to all of its details, but its main thrust seems to me to be sound. God does not need to lean on

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us, yet he does just this, and this is an act of great love for it brings with it challenge and trust and inspiration and character. It's a soul-stirring thing to be so loved by God that he uses you in his plans. And in like manner, it's a heartbreaking thing to see anyone refuse this gift of helpful freedom and

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God-serving autonomy and in belligerent arrogance stand square against the wishes and the dreams of God. The individual who insists on the righteousness rat race for himself and refuses the call of God to almighty enterprise, such a one turns freedom into license. But still, God will not strike

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him or her down. Instead, never wavering in his faithfulness, he keeps his part of the bargain. Though we use his very gift of freedom against him, still he persists in his patience. His love lasts and he shows it by leaning on our shoulders and asking, "Do you love me enough to go where I want to go? Do you

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love me?" That's the question Jesus put to Peter that day by the lake. Peter had forsaken him. You remember the story. He denied that he even knew Jesus. It came time for Peter to stand up for Jesus and instead he argued, "When I look, Lord, I'm ready to stand up, but not up to that kind of witness, not up to that kind of

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service. Now I'll just go apart for a while, hide in the dark shadow of this lie, and build up my spiritual strength a little, and then perhaps someday I'll be strong enough and righteous enough to answer your call. But until then..." And the Lord turned and looked at him. And now, much later, by the lakeside, Jesus is

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looking at Peter again and he asks, "Do you love me?" I hear him ask that question so many times. For you see, I am Peter. Every time I deny Jesus, want to hide in the frenzy of spiritual calisthenics when he's calling me out onto the field and into the middle of the game. He says to me, "Lend me your shoulder." And every

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such time I hear Jesus ask, "Do you love me in your freedom? Do you love me?" And sometimes I look at him and I say, "Well, Lord, you tell me. My spiritual state confuses me. My motives are all mixed up, but I can think of a dozen reasons why I should..." And the answer is nothing else. He doesn't add a single syllable. He just

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says again, "Do you love me?" Unchangeable as a dead man, calm as all eternity, he repeats it. "Do you love me?" I hear it especially when the stillness makes me lonely. It is a hard thing to discover that the freedom he comes and gives is altogether genuine, but that with it comes the vision of his purpose and his

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hope that we will play our part in it. I mean, it was a scary thing the day I discovered that God was not willing to turn off the world so that I could do my thing, my rat race. He's the kind of God, you see, who's always moving the furniture around, upsetting things. He isn't a dear and dainty God, but a great

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big God who goes through the world with a plan, and he bumps into things as he goes, and he says, "Give me your shoulder, if you love me, to lean upon." And I stand there, or cower there, and I wonder why he keeps saying that to me, yet there is no doubt in my mind that I am the one being addressed. Why can't he leave me alone to

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my furious little, pious little rat races? Why does he keep on reaching into my life, butting in? That's it. God, why do you keep butting in? Can't you wait a minute? And he answers, "I cannot wait even a minute. Do you love me?" And that is an answer and a question all at the same time.

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So once a boy sought entrance to the court of King Arthur, and at the ancient gateway to the court, an old man stood. "Dare you?" the old man asked, glancing sharply at the boy. "Once past this gate, our royal Lord will lay upon you so glorious a burden that it is tragedy that any man should miss it, but a

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burden so heavy that no man can carry it." Well, what would happen if we were to answer today, all things being what they are? What would happen if we, folks with mixed-up motives, were to say, "Sir, write my name down."

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Let us pray. Oh God, sometimes even in your loving, you scare us to death. Somehow, with that special gentleness that belongs to you, with your loving, please God, scare us into life, into living for the sake of Jesus, in whose name we pray. Amen.

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♪ The Lord is my light and my salvation ♪ ♪ Whom then shall I fear? ♪ ♪ Whom then shall I fear? ♪ ♪ The Lord is the strength of my life ♪ ♪ The Lord is the strength of my life ♪ ♪ Whom then shall I be afraid? ♪ ♪ Though one host of men were laid against me ♪ ♪ Yet shall not my heart be afraid ♪

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♪ And though their words of war against me ♪ ♪ Yet shall I put my trust in him ♪ ♪ For in the time of trouble ♪ ♪ He will hide me in his tabernacle ♪ ♪ Yea, in the sacred places of his dwelling ♪ ♪ Shall he hide me ♪ ♪ And set me up upon a rock of stone ♪

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♪ ♪ The Lord is my light and my salvation ♪ ♪ Whom then shall I fear? ♪ ♪ Whom then shall I fear? ♪ ♪ The Lord is the strength of my life ♪ ♪ The Lord is the strength of my life ♪ ♪ Whom then shall I be afraid? ♪

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♪ Afraid ♪ ♪ [MUSIC]